The screaming cock fiends been thinking bout the way you do it good.

Alun's talking about the Peep Showification of his experience at concerts, an intellect pulling his awareness out of immediate experience and to a mediated 3rd person platform watching himself in the world, being a bit of a wanker. I found this sentiment deeply depressing and somewhat alien, but not surprising as such. Given this submital of experience before the intellect, combined with a little guilt maybe, Alun's account of mastubatory narcissism makes sense to me.

An examination like Alun refers to individuates the self; the thinker is distinct and alone. The majority of experience and human culture lies within the limits of what the thinker can know, but there are things outside of these limits. There are, to quote something I heard today, things that can only be "known through the body", things that "could never emerge from words". The gulf between my understanding of experience and feelings as expressed in language and thought and the immediate reality of the existence of the world has always struck me. The force of music, its very real transformative and revelatory power, lie in its existence outside of the realm of language and the sort of indirect thought Alun refers to.

What Alun expresses is the difficulty in trying to account for this immediacy after the fact. The process of pulling something into the realm of this reflective, analytic, language robs it of its haecceity and leaves it superficial, inane, "lovely". This inherent contradiction in writing about music in this way (the way I'm writing now) put me off writing about music altogether, until I came to see that it was possible to use language in other ways to write about music, and that those ways might have value and power. To develop these methods was my ambition in starting this. I am finding that the naturality of this sort of writing belies how difficult it is, and how easy it is to slip into this. So:

"The first step in learning how to play rock guitar is to unlearn how not to play rock guitar."

I think Ro's move in his thinking is similar and analagous to this. In the kingdom of the blind, everyone had perfect pitch and free telephone.